No fishy taste? Claims that krill fishing is sustainable are hard to swallow

It’s a sad day, but I think I have run out of krill puns.
Well, I’ve been banging
on about this for a few years now, and since Happy Feet 2
basically unleashed every krill joke possible, courtesy of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, there’s not a lot left.

At a most basic level, the idea of protecting areas for
nature and the benefits that brings is pretty simple. Where it gets tricky is
when there are competing interests in the form of human activities.

‘Dredge’ is one of those evocative words that just doesn’t sound
nice. When it comes to the seabed, the effects of dredging are certainly
none-too-pleasant. That’s true whether it’s scouring out the seabed on purpose
to remove sand and gravel, or using heavy metal fishing gear to churn up the
sea floor to catch scallops that live in it.

The trailer for the new series of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s
Fish Fight (which starts tonight at 9pm on Channel 4) shows quite graphically what dredging for scallops looks like.

Where were you when you heard the news? I was sitting in a very chilly train station in Edinburgh, cursing a delayed train, unable to extricate myself from Twitter to go get a restorative coffee, when the news came through: Members of the European Parliament, those elected but often-maligned creatures, had voted overwhelmingly in favour of radical, progressive reform of Europe’s fish laws.

This weekend, an unprecedented meeting took place in
Brussels. At first glance it might not seem like much of a big deal - a bunch of
fishermen from across Europe getting together in the EU capital . But this was different.

Cheeky
perhaps, but that is the gist of what is referred to in European fishy politics
circles as ‘The External Dimension’. Although it sounds like something from sci-fi, this is quite simply European fishing boats catching fish in
non-European waters. Earlier this year I joined a Greenpeace
ship in West Africa to see the scale of this first hand. It’s a pretty big
deal, in every sense.

Basic first aid tells you
the most important thing to do is not cause any more harm: don’t make things
worse. That makes sense, of course, but if you happen upon someone lying
bleeding on the pavement, simply not kicking them on the way past isn’t
really a good enough reaction.

I’ve been
struggling for analogies to use, ways to try and explain just what is so bad
about the recent EU
Council ‘agreement’ on fish stocks.

Last weekend Cornwall Greenpeace group took our new campaign to the Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival

EU Council meetings – the epitome of fun. These are when
representatives of each EU member state, usually the relevant government
minister, get together to discuss issues of importance. Last Monday - all day, and into the small
hours, it was the turn of the UK’s minister, Richard Benyon to get
together with his 26 counterparts to discuss and agree a way forward on Common
Fisheries Policy reform.

Be a fisherman's friend launch event at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth

Last Friday was World Oceans Day. Being an oceans campaigner that, on one hand, means a lot – but on the other it begs the question of why the rest of the world
doesn’t think about oceans all the other days, like I do!?

Approximately 1.5 MILLION small-scale fishermen live and work along the coast of West Africa. They live a life directly dependent on the seas on their doorstep. And it's not just them - their families and communities depend on it too, of course. Yet here in the seas off West Africa it's clear to see their interests are being ignored in favour of allowing massive, industrialised, factory fishing vessels to gobble up all the fish. Of course some of this is illicit, but much of it is legitimised plunder, such as the huge PFA vessels down here with EU subsidies and paid-for Fisheries Partnership Agreements.